


Sea-Longing

by Shachaai



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, F/M, Folklore, Tagging too much spoils the plot, lots of feelings about the ocean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-24 21:24:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19732054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shachaai/pseuds/Shachaai
Summary: Gloria understood sea-longing before Arthur, and understands sea-longing a different way now she has him and he leaves and returns to her like an unpredictable tide.





	Sea-Longing

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted from tumblr.
> 
> Gloria is f!Portugal.

Gloria had had her fortune read once, when she was nineteen, home from university for the summer and burnt by the hot sun and her relatives’ expectations for her future. Tarot.

It’d been Toni’s fault that the teller had read the cards looking for a prediction of Gloria’s love life; he’d been teasing her about their grandmother asking her before when she was going to bring _a nice boy_ home. So Antonio had draped himself out over Gloria’s shoulders like an unwelcome blanket, her in a tank-top, him naked from the waist up, their skin sticking together with summer sweat, and asked the tarot-reader what the cards had to say about Gloria and _love_.

Tarot cards are not terribly direct things, building upon information already known to grasp at answers. To Gloria, they had just been pictures, but the fortune-teller had told their stories for Gloria and Antonio to hear. Major arcana cards, cups, many cups. Ace of cups. Ten of cups. Knight of cups. The Lovers. Gloria forgets the details, but the reader tells her that her future is full of love, with a heartfelt suitor, and tied to the element of water. Perhaps she’ll love a sailor.

Arthur is not a sailor. Arthur is not a sailor, but eight years on from tarot-readings his lips taste of salt when he comes home to her with the dim light of nautical dawn grey and hazy through her windows. He kisses Gloria awake with his soft mouth and softer, cooler fingertips cradling her cheeks, his fair hair falling in half-damp wisps across her forehead.

Though she hates waking early, Gloria loves those mornings, smiling before she’s awake. Arthur is very easy to wind into her bed, bare skin under borrowed clothes only warming when it rubs against her own body, and his strong hands are always at their most delicate when they trace the shape of her ribs beneath the covers, the muscles of her hips and thighs, before they sweep back up across her belly, across her breasts before cupping her face once more, leaning in again to kiss her sleep-crusted eyelashes. Nose. Mouth.

“Do I pass muster?” Gloria asks him, if only to open her eyes to the low rumble of laughter that presses through Arthur’s chest to her own, a lullaby-song like the sound of the distant ocean.

“Your beauty dazzles me,” Arthur tells her, and proprietarily pushes one of his cold thighs between her much warmer ones. He has a crooked smile, pressing it to Gloria’s palm when she raises a thumb to rub away the rough salt crystals still clinging to his cheeks, feeling the scratch of them under the pad. In the pre-dawn light, even his sea-green eyes gleam silver. “Even when you drool.”

Gloria shoves the heel of her palm into his nose until he apologises, and, when she falls asleep again, it is with Arthur in her arms, his spine curved into her front and her mouth still smiling against his nape.

Naturally, when she wakes up again with the noon sun spilling across her floor, Arthur has already left the bed, but the bathroom is still steamy with condensation and the damp clothes he must’ve worn to get to her house have been left to air before being put in with the rest of the dirty laundry. The rest of the house, when Gloria emerges into it, has been similarly tidied; still sleepy, she has to squint at the bright reflection of the sun on her (offensively) squeaky-clean draining board, and then squint _again_ when she has to actually go into her bread bin to get out the rolls she had been quite happy to leave out on her bench two days before.

When they had told Gloria’s family that Arthur worked as a freelance editor and occasional writer for a magazine in England - something that is actually _true,_ although Gloria’s family had not been told just how little of Arthur’s disappearances from Portugal are for Arthur’s work -, Gloria’s mother had joked that at least Arthur’s job made sure that he had plenty of time to keep the house clean whilst Gloria was away.

Gloria had laughed at the time, accustomed to her mother’s jokes about how her only daughter kept the chicken coop in her garden in better order than her own house - but every time Arthur _does_ come home, he _cleans_. Gloria is a little untidy - things get put away, generally, but not always in the correct place -, but she hardly lives in a pit of squalor. Arthur deep-cleans her house anyway, starting with general tidying and washing down benches and walls, sorting through and handling the laundry, and vacuuming. The chickens are a bit wary of him so the most he can do for the coop is feed them on those days when Gloria is too busy - or sleeping - to, but the rest of the garden usually ends up looking so immaculate Gloria’s neighbours stop treating her like the repentant Mary Magdalene when she turns up to share some of her chickens’ eggs with them and more like they _haven’t_ had to return her skirt, heels, and a used bra to her the day after her friends have gotten her spectacularly drunk on a summer night out and she stripped off whilst tottering up her own garden path at three am. More than once.

Arthur smells like warm dust and sun and Gloria’s bodywash when he traipses in barefoot from _whatever_ he’s been doing to her neglected garden, earth and green chlorophyll under his nails. Gloria opens her arms happily to him for another hug, but her shoe-hating sweetheart side-steps her with a grin to wash his hands in the sink. Gloria wraps herself around him from behind instead, pressing her forehead to his shoulder and letting her hands slip over the sharp edges of his hipbones under his soft, faded shirt. (She is, most likely, getting breadcrumbs stuck under his clothes, but that is _his_ cross to bear, not hers.) Like this, he is so _pointy._ All soft, smooth skin, lithe muscle and evident bones beneath.

“Mama thinks I never feed you,” Gloria says, digging her face into Arthur’s shoulder and inhaling the scent of him, his warmth, with shameless indulgence. It’s been a month and a half since she saw him last, and three days longer than that since they were like this - since _he_ was like this. Human. Hers. “You’re so thin.”

Arthur hums, tipping his head so his cheek presses companionably on the top of her head - they both know he’s only this slim some of the time, shedding his weight the moment he puts pale pink toes on Portuguese shores. “Shouldn’t have told her I can’t cook, then.”

Gloria pouts very dramatically at him. “I did _not_ tell her you couldn’t cook; I told her you burnt scrambled eggs and tried to hide the ruined saucepan in the bin.” The only times Arthur is fat are when he cannot eat his own cooking, but none of these are things Gloria can explain to her mother.

“Once,” says Arthur, and turns around in Gloria’s grasp before she can get a good grope in on one of his thighs so he can hold her in return. He wipes his hands off on her shirt because he is terrible.

“ _Scrambled eggs,_ querido,” says Gloria, and grins at the beginnings of a pretty pink blush on Arthur’s cheeks, settling for cheerfully groping his butt in their new position instead. Is still grinning as he kisses her, soft approving noises slipping out of her at his thumbs stroking her throat, his nails scratching a shiver through her nerves before he has his fingers in her sleep-tangled hair.

This, moments like this, whether they are in the bed or the garden or like this, Arthur bracketed up against the sink as they both kiss themselves dizzy, make the times when Arthur is away more bearable. Also remembering all the times when Arthur has been an inconsiderate _dick,_ but Gloria likes to dwell on the happier things when sea-longing drags her down to the beach.

Arthur forever leaves the smell of the ocean on her pillows and sand in her sheets. He leaves dirty laundry and half-full mugs of cold tea about her house when he goes, and when he comes back he brings gifts: pretty rocks and seashells, sea-glass, expensive seafood and two dead ducks only lightly chewed. He brings back stories of what he’s done whilst he’s been gone and where he’s been, and he, most tenderly, brings back a long strip of silvery-brown cloth, lightly spotted, warm from his own body and so infinitely precious that it had taken two years for Arthur to even allow Gloria to _glance_ at it, let alone know where he put it whilst he was with her.

Half of another year, and Arthur had let Gloria touch it, warm, smooth softness under her palm. Sealskin. A harbour seal’s skin, _uma foca-comum,_ to be more precise, so strange to see so far south.

Half of another year again, and Arthur had awkwardly but gratefully accepted the old unused jewellery box Gloria had offered him to place the skin inside when he came to see her, a reasonably sized wooden thing, with a small lock and key that was Arthur’s to hide or keep. Gloria had left the house for a few hours - food shopping - to give Arthur plenty of time to hide the jewellery box somewhere, but when she had returned home and placed her bags down he had taken her hand and showed her where the jewellery box had been tucked away, nestled amongst her winter scarves and gloves like a small animal hibernating for winter.

Around that point they had stopped saying Arthur was visiting her - instead, Arthur had started _coming home._

They had met four years ago, then again three and a half years ago - and then, after that, the longest Arthur had been away from her had been three months. This past year, he has never been gone longer than a month and a half, but his average time away from Gloria is only two weeks. Mostly he leaves for a day or two. Once, he had only been gone three hours.

Gloria’s family are starting to look at Gloria’s hand for a ring. Gloria does not know how to ask her family - or the government, or a _priest -_ about the legality of marrying a selkie. She has never even asked Arthur if he has a _passport,_ or where he was born. _So you turn into a seal?_ had mostly put all the other important questions out of her mind.

Also her slight hysteria the first time she had actually _seen_ Arthur don his skin and turn into a seal, followed up by the still slightly-delirious cooing at how cute and chubby her seal boyfriend _is_ as a seal, and her immediate need to shower kisses on her seal boyfriend’s wet nose.

The seal thing really is quite distracting.

Harbour seals are one of the species of pinnipeds that are _not_ monogamous. The fact - too - occasionally crosses Gloria’s mind when she’s driving on her way to work, the ocean glittering in her field of view and her mind still too sleepy to immediately dismiss nonsense. Not counting _seal,_ Arthur speaks English, French, reasonable Spanish and enough Portuguese to charm Gloria’s family and make her blush; he has more than enough words in enough languages to seduce a pretty girl or boy somewhere else Gloria doesn’t know, someone who lives further north by waters that it is _not_ so weird to see a harbour seal swimming in. Arthur always swims north when he leaves her, he’s told her so; the colder streams of the Atlantic must help bring him to his senses.

Then again, Arthur’s awkwardness and snappishness when provoked by people _other_ than Gloria would suggest he’d have better luck attempting to seduce a grumpy walrus than another human.

Gloria is not sure what her feelings would be about losing her selkie boyfriend to a seductive walrus, but even the thought of it makes her need to park her car very suddenly, lean forward over her steering wheel, and laugh. Slightly hysterically - again -, but laugh.

At home, there is Arthur, or there is not. He has made her no promises except that he will always return to Gloria as long as she will have him, and, words stumbling over his tongue as he turned a red brighter than sunburn, that he loves her. He cannot… There is something about the sea, he’d said. He sometimes just _needs_ to go back to the sea, and there is no way to measure the depth of that longing, or any real way to truly, totally, quench it.

Gloria had been fond of swimming, of going out on her family’s boats and long, quiet walks on the beach by herself, long before she had met Arthur. Sitting on the sand and reading until the sun went down, with nothing but the wind and the gulls and the surf in her ears. She understood sea-longing before Arthur, and understands sea-longing a different way now she has him and he leaves and returns to her like an unpredictable tide.

There is not an Arthur-sized hole in Gloria’s house or life when the selkie is not there, but her heart misses him while he is gone. You cannot skype or text a seal. You certainly cannot have phonesex with one. But when Arthur _is_ there -

Oh, he makes her happy. Simply happy, without a complication in her heart despite all the complications loving a selkie brings for her head. Even if he ruins her saucepans (he really _cannot_ cook), tidies things away in places it takes her three days to find, and has a permanently passive-aggressive set of chronic misunderstandings with her brother. They can talk about things, Arthur and her, work things out between them. They _will_ talk about things, because Arthur always come home to her for a reason.

“…Hey,” Arthur says, breaking off their kiss to nudge his nose against hers and draw Gloria out of her thoughts, his green gaze very close and inquiring. He has bumped kisses to her face like this in his seal form too - but the human form, at least, doesn’t suffer so much from fish breath. Imperfect and beautiful. “Where are you?”

Gloria nudges him back, letting her eyes slide shut at the simple pleasure of Arthur’s cheek against her own, nuzzling. The ocean cannot have this from her. “Não te preocupes, querido. Always with you.”


End file.
